What is this Data gathering that I hear Google & facebook doing?
You hear this all the time that Google and facebook are collecting data about people. You must’ve wondered what kind of data are they collecting, I mean it’s not like you are putting sensitive data about your health and private life in facebook. So what will they do with this data – or who will they send?
Well in some places, particularly in Europe, privacy is big deal, hence people seem to be concerned. But the data that these companies collect are not for personal targeted use per se, but to analyse. Let me illustrate.
There are many places, things, products and people that you click the like button on facebook. Now facebook has the data about your age, gender, place of residence etc. With all that data, if they map all the people who’ve liked something … let’s say a beverage of some kind, they may find that people from some places like that beverage – a cola – a lot whilst that is not the case with others.
Now if a cola company gets this data, it can see why people from those particular place like the beverage – maybe because of more ads – and use that information to increase their sales in other areas. Conversely a rival cola company may see that people from these places have more affinity to cola and decide to increase their billboard ads in those areas, thereby taking market share.
Although facebook, Google and ilk can also look at your personal data and know many things that you may want to hide from others – but generally the data gathering they do is for a hoard of data – at a personal level you may get a thing like a targeted ad, but it’s the doing of an algorithm, not a human.
All this gathering and data analysis has been the result of internet coming into our everyday life. Earlier there was data analysis, but the collection of data was a big deal, we needed something like a decadal census for collecting large amount of data. And as you can see, only governments could do that kind of big operations. And that too once a decade.
But now, due to internet in every nook and corner, you could provide a form to people and they’ll be clicking happily about anything from a polio vaccination to what brand of soap they buy – how many times a month.
This has also opened up a whole new career area. Data analytics and decision making based on data analytics has become an integral part of marketing. Companies now collect and analyse the data about who, where, when & how their (or their competitors) products and services are used and change their products, services, marketing strategy and ads to increase their sales or reduce expenditure.
If you are thinking of a career in a decision making capability – like doing an MBA, then doing a course on data-analytics would be a good idea since every employer expects their managers to have that skills; and yet the MBA programme only gives you an introduction to data analytics. You can do the data analytics course online – in Pune you could do it with Eiubs.eu.
